GOSSE, Philip Henry. Creation (Omphalos). An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot.

Belly Buttons in the Garden of Eden

GOSSE, Philip Henry. Creation (Omphalos). An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot. London: John Van Voorst. 1857.

8vo in 12s. Publisher’s green cloth, spine lettered in gilt; pp. xiv, 376, [4 (advertisements)]; 56 lithographic in-text illustrations; a little spotting to endpapers and title-page, partially uncut; a few scuffs to boards, spine bumped at head; internally very good; pencilled ownership inscription to title-page and note to front free endpaper.

First edition, second issue of Gosse’s pre-Darwinian and anti-evolutionary account of creation, based around the question of whether Adam, having not been born of a woman, would have had a navel (the omphalos in question).

Gosse argues that Adam would indeed have been born with a navel, according to his theory of Prochronism. One of the most influential and skilled naturalists of his day, Gosse was also a devout member of the Plymouth Brethren and was profoundly disturbed by the new evolutionary theories that threatened his Christian view of the universe. His theory attempts to combine the chronology of Biblical creation with geological evidence suggesting that the Earth was far more than 6,000 years old. It states that the Earth had been created by God with fossils in its rocks and that Adam had been created with a navel because those forms are characteristics of those objects – ‘The Man would not have been a Man without a navel’ (p. 349). Hence, an impression of great antiquity was presented to those who did not see that ‘the Creator had before his mind a projection of the whole life-history of the globe […] He determines to call this idea into actual existence, not at the supposed commencing point, but at some stage or other of its course. It is clear, then, that at the selected stage it appears, exactly as it would have appeared at that moment of its history, if all the preceding eras of its history had been real’ (p. 351).

The Church was outraged because Gosse seemed to be suggesting that God had set out deliberately to deceive mankind about the age of His creation; evolutionists derided the obvious non sequiturs presented by his theories. Omphalos, which Gosse considered his great work, grievously damaged his reputation and overshadowed his pioneering work as a naturalist. Charles Darwin, who was still nervously shielding his theory of natural selection aware of the furore it would cause, ‘was aware of Philip Henry Gosse’s Omphalos […] in which Gosse … [showed] the same ardent desire to reconcile faith and science that Gosse’s son Edmund would pity in Father and Son decades later, and that goaded [Charles] Kingsley into announcing that God would scarcely have written on the rocks ‘one enormous and superfluous lie’ (Browne, p. 22). Its value today, apart from its interest as a vigorously argued and entertaining work, is as a document of the febrile intellectual environment in which Darwin, his allies and his opponents found themselves operating. Gosse, in his sincere but woefully misguided attempt to fit new facts into old dogmas, embodies the cultural crisis that Darwin and Wallace would bring to a head the following year when they presented their joint paper on natural selection to the Linnean Society.

The book was initially published simply as Omphalos. Of the 4,000 copies printed, only 600 had sold by 1869 and it was making a loss when Gosse decided to change the title to something clearer to try to boost sales. The only difference between the two issues is the cancel title-page. The sales strategy did not work: ‘It seems undoubted that a considerable number were pulped, and the book today is far scarcer than some of his others which we know to have been printed in much smaller numbers’ (Freeman and Wertheimer).

BM(NH) II, p. 697; Freeman and Wertheimer 82, in a binding variant not noted – as a and b but with ILLUSTRATED in gilt added to spine. See Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (2002).

SKU: 2125970